‘Bee Wilson is one of my favourite writers and this may be her best book’ CHRIS VAN TULLEKEN

This strikingly original account from award-winning food writer Bee Wilson charts how everyday objects take on deeply personal meanings in all our lives.

One ordinary day, the tin in which Bee Wilson baked her wedding cake fell to the ground at her feet. This should have been unremarkable, except that her marriage had just ended.

Unsettled by her own feelings about the heart-shaped tin, Wilson begins a search for others who have attached strong and even magical meanings to kitchen objects. She meets people who deal with grief or pain by projecting emotions onto certain objects, whether it is a beloved parent’s salt shaker, a cracked pasta bowl or an inherited china dinner service. Remembering her own mother, a dementia sufferer, she explores the ways that both of them have been haunted by deciding which kitchen utensils to hold on to and which to get rid of when you think you are losing your mind.

Looking to different continents, cultures and civilisations to investigate the full scope of this phenomenon, Wilson blends her own experiences with a series of touching personal stories that reflect the irrational and fundamentally human urge to keep mementos. Why would a man trapped in a concentration camp decide to make a spoon for himself? Why do some people hoard? What do gifts mean? How do we decide what is junk and what is treasure? We see firsthand how objects can contain hidden symbols, keep the past alive and even become powerful symbols of identity and resistance; from a child’s first plate to a refugee’s rescued vegetable corers.

Thoughtful, tender and beautifully written, The Heart-Shaped Tin is a moving examination of love, loss, broken cups and the legacy of things we all leave behind.

A TIMES and GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

NIGELLA LAWSON’S COOKBOOK OF THE YEAR

‘Notes from a lifetime of reading, thinking, cooking and eating’ Diana Henry

The Secret of Cooking is packed with solutions for how to make life in the kitchen work better for you, whether you are cooking for yourself or for a crowd.

Bee shows you how to get a meal on the table when you’re tired and stretched for time, how to season properly, cook onions (or not) and what equipment really helps.

The 140 recipes are doable and delicious, filled with ideas for cooking ahead or cooking alone and the kind of unfussy food that makes everyday life taste better.

‘A lifetime of kitchen wisdom here’ Nigel Slater

‘A truly remarkable cookbook that will change lives’ Rachel Roddy

‘It’s not often that a genuinely game-changing cook book comes out, but this accomplished, approachable and helpful book – its writing as nourishing as the recipes – is most definitely it. Quite frankly, there’s not a kitchen that should be without a copy of The Secret of Cooking‘ Nigella Lawson

‘There is wisdom, and notes from a lifetime of reading, thinking, cooking and eating here. And it’s not just about food but about how we live, and how we look after ourselves and each other’ Diana Henry

This is the story of how we have tamed fire and ice, wielded whisks, spoons, graters, mashers, pestles and mortars, all in the name of feeding ourselves. Bee Wilson takes us on an enchanting culinary journey through the incredible creations, inventions and obsessions that have shaped how and what we cook. From huge Tudor open fires to sous-vide machines, the birth of the fork to Roman gadgets, Consider the Fork is the previously unsung history of our kitchens.

Bee Wilson writes a weekly food column, ‘The Kitchen Thinker’ in The Sunday Telegraph, for which she has three times been named the Guild of Food Writers Food Journalist of the Year. Her previous books include The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us and Swindled!. Before she became a food writer, she was a Research Fellow in History at St John’s College, Cambridge. She has also been a semi-finalist on Masterchef. Her favourite kitchen implement is currently the potato ricer.

‘A cracking good read, as enjoyable as it is enlightening’ Raymond Blanc, Chef-Patron ‘Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons’

‘Wonderful … Witty, scholarly, utterly absorbing and fired by infectious curiosity’ Lucy Lethbridge, Observer

‘[A] delightfully informative history of cooking and eating from the prehistoric discovery of fire to twenty-first-century high-tech, low-temp soud-vide-style cookery’ ELLE magazine

‘A graceful study’ Steven Poole, Guardian